In many systems the total amount of resources which are available is limited with some or all of the resources being shared between multiple users. Examples of such systems including cloud computing environments and communications systems. In the case of cloud computing systems the shared resources which are available may be processing cores executing a particular application or supporting a particular hardware function. In the case of communications systems the resources may be wireless bandwidth which can be used by multiple devices but which to be useful should be shared in a manner which allows multiple devices to use portions of the shared resource in a manner that does not totally block or preclude at least some other users to use some of the limited resource, e.g., bandwidth.
In systems where resource user's may be responsible for implementing at least a portion of resource utilization policies and reporting resource utilization to a centralized authority or register which may then reallocate or authorize use of different amounts of the limited resource by different devices, there is a need to take into consideration communication delays and the possibility that some resource utilization messages may be dropped or lost. Thus, despite efforts of devices to report resource utilization information and/or renew or obtain authorization for future use of resources, communications errors may result in centralized storage of reported resource utilization information being inaccurate or incomplete due to unintentional communications errors or message delays.
Resource utilization information which is used to authorize use of resources by individual devices may also be inaccurate due to intentional fraud. For example, a user of a device may intentionally interfere with the communication of a resource utilization message so that the user can obtain unauthorized access to a resource and/or avoid compensating the resource owner for access to the resource. In addition to interfering with the communication of a resource utilization message, a user may attempt to delete a resource utilization message from a storage site used to hold such messages and/or information.
While intentional interference with the communication or storage of resource utilization information may be appealing to the fraudulent individual seeking to obtain access to the limited resources that are available, unauthorized use of the limited resources may degrade system performance and/or functionally provided to authorized users who where expecting to be able to use the limited resources since the authorized users maybe denied access to the resources.
From a technical perspective it might seem that a useful approach to the above described technical problems of loss of messages communicating resource utilization information, transmission delays of resource utilization information reports and/or possible corruption or tampering with stored resource utilization information would be to improve the reliability and/or security of the communications and/or storage system used to communicate resource information, the communications network and/or storage system might not be owned or managed by the entity attempting to manage and control utilization of the limited resources, e.g., processing and/or bandwidth resources.
In view of the above discussion, it should be appreciated that there is a need for improved methods and/or apparatus for managing resource utilization in systems where reported resource information may be delayed and/or partially unreliable for a variety of reasons.